<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <html><head> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head>+1 to that banner Shimri, although it's a bit wordy. but would prefer or to go alongside ( the criticism part ) the answer too ie ' The Solution is Real Democracy!<hr/><div><b>From: </b> Shimri <shimriz@gmail.com>
</div><div><b>Sender: </b> strikersassembly@googlegroups.com
</div><div><b>Date: </b>Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:26:51 +0100</div><div><b>To: </b><strikersassembly@googlegroups.com></div><div><b>ReplyTo: </b> strikersassembly@googlegroups.com
</div><div><b>Cc: </b><noii-uk@lists.riseup.net>; <diggers350@yahoogroups.com>; <democracyvillage@googlegroups.com>; <campaignforrealdemocracy@lists.aktivix.org>; <project2012@googlegroups.com>; <peopleincommon@lists.riseup.net>; <trafalgar-square-assembly@googlegroups.com></div><div><b>Subject: </b>Re: The Times Onslaught</div><div><br/></div><div dir="ltr">sorry that meant to read - (and maybe put down that sign after further discussion)<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 22 October 2011 12:24, Shimri <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:shimriz@gmail.com">shimriz@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div dir="ltr">actually there was a discussion and at least in my 10 people's group we had consensus we DO NOT want to be called anti-capitalists. <div>
<br></div><div>There was a vote about removing the sign, and desicion was half-half. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Suggestion: We should come up with a new, additional sign, I proposed the "our system is unsustainable, undemocratic and unjust", that is the first sentence in the London statement, therfore it will be very democratic act to put it up (and maybe put down that sign).</div>
<div><br></div><div>xx</div><div>Shimri<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 22 October 2011 10:44, Virginia Lopez Calvo <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:virginialopezcalvo@googlemail.com" target="_blank">virginialopezcalvo@googlemail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi everybody,<div><br></div><div>I think these articles have a point. Our Tent City claims to be anti-capitalist, or so the banner at the entrance say, when this issue has not been discussed democratically in the general assembly. It was once in the agenda of the day, on Wednesday, but instead of a dialogue where opinions from across the board can be heard and there is space for debate, we only dedicated 10 minutes to the issue during which, rather than exploring it and trying to come up with a common message, a few of those who are not scared of public speaking grabbed the mike, gave the usual ideological speech, a few cheered, a few booed and the discussion was over.</div>
<div><br></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;color:black;background:white">I think we should bring this (again) to the
attention of the general assembly and have a truly democratic assembly where space of debate exist, where people can learn from each other, where there is an attitude for consensus, rather than a battle of ideas, and where the outcome can be said to be 'the voice of the camp'. </span></span><span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;color:black;background:white">And most importantly, we
wouldn't be alienating millions who, like me, haven't made up their minds yet
on whether they want capitalism or not, and what model they want if they do. If
we are about real democracy we should get discussing this topic and until then convey
clearly to media that we are not an</span><span style="background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255)"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;color:black;background-repeat:initial initial"> <span></span></span><span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;color:rgb(34, 34, 34);background-repeat:initial initial">anti</span></span></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255)"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;color:black;background-repeat:initial initial">-<span style="background-repeat:initial initial"></span></span><span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;color:rgb(34, 34, 34);background-repeat:initial initial">capitalist</span></span></span><span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;color:black;background:white"> </span></span><span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;color:black;background:white">movement (at least just
yet).</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;color:black;background:white"><br></span></span></p><font color="#888888"><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;color:black;background:white">Virginia.</span></span></p>
</font><div><div></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 6:25 AM, Mark Barrett <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:marknbarrett@googlemail.com" target="_blank">marknbarrett@googlemail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
See below for more info.<br><br>Suffice to say it is galvanising a response from the Occupy LSX Media team. Hopefully we can turn this into a full blown statement of in tent (sic).<br><br>Real Democracy Now!<br><br>Love and Solidarity<br>
<br>Mark <br> <br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><span><b>Phillip Collins 21/10 Editorial (FYI Collins is also a Times Leader writer) </b></span></div><div>
<span>Keep your new Jerusalem. I’ll take capitalism</span><span><b>Philip Collins</b></span></div><div><br>
</div><div><span>The Dale Farm and St Paul’s protesters are deluded. Law and commerce have made Britain a much more pleasant land </span></div><div>
<span>‘Here
ye. This is Rooster Byron, telling all you Kennet and Avon, South
Wiltshire bandits and Salisbury white wigs. Bang your gavels. Issue
your warrants. You can’t make the wind blow ... Take your leaflets and
your borstal and your beatings and your health and [naughty word]
safety and pack your whole poxy, sham-faced plot and get.”</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>This is the dissenting defiance of the exuberant fabulist of Jez Butterworth’s remarkable play, </span><span><i>Jerusalem.</i></span><span>
Rooster Byron is a Romany squatter fighting the intention of the
authorities to evict him from his mobile home in the forest. Where is
the beauty, he wails, of the F99 enforcement notice under the terms of
the Pollution Control and Local Government Order 1974 set against the
cherubs and elves of English folklore? As the new-build estate creeps
closer, Byron breathes fire against the paradise he is losing and
asserts the right of every free-born Englishman to have a party on his
green and pleasant land.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span><i>Jerusalem</i></span><span>
is too subtle a play to be agitprop and Byron too complex a character
to be a cipher for a crude philosophy. But he does speak for an idyll
of the common wealth in which occupation is the law of the land. And he
does call up a mythical past that we are invited to believe has been
degraded by modernity. As the police stormed Dale Farm in Basildon in a
violent struggle, and as protesters camped outside St Paul’s
Cathedral, it was impossible not to hear echoes of Byron’s monologues.</span></div><div><span>In
claiming Dale Farm, where they have lived without permission since
2001, the travellers are making the very moral demand that defines
Rooster Byron. The land, they say, is part of the ancient common wealth
of the nation. It is the property of all, a gift of the landscape we
all share. The police force that confronts them upholds the law in a
way that they, along with Rooster Byron, dismiss as officious and
unfeeling.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Travellers
can live however they like for all I care, but the judgment from the
High Court was unanswerable: the desire to live in caravans does not
license a breach of the criminal law. It is frivolous to pretend, as
Byron and the travellers both do, that an illegal encampment has any
superior moral force.</span></div><div><span>It
is also odd to behold a group of travellers who will do anything to
make sure they don’t have to travel. And when they are urinating on the
police from 40ft-high scaffolding (remarkably there is a similar scene
in </span><span><i>Jerusalem</i></span><span>),
it is clear that they will do anything. William Blake once said that
“the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”. As usual, he was
wrong. It doesn’t. The road of excess leads to excess. Both Byron’s
forest and Dale Farm are policed by the threat of violence rather than
the law. It is not fair to say that Tony Ball, the leader of Basildon
Council, has been the small-minded enemy of the common wealth. He has,
in fact, been the brave and reasonable spokesman of the common law.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Meanwhile,
outside St Paul’s Cathedral, anti-capitalist protesters have begun a
vigil under tarpaulin to dramatise their case that the avarice of
investment bankers has ruined the global economy. There is no need to
minimise our economic problems to make a mockery of this. There was —
indeed is — a crisis in banking. Credit was too freely available and
regulation was too crude for the complexity of today’s financial
products. But that’s not pithy enough to make a slogan. So, instead,
the banner that stands above the tent village announces baldly that
“capitalism is crisis”.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>It
is notable that more than one British newspaper has solemnly declared
that, though the protesters may be a ragged bunch, they do have a
point. To which it needs to be retorted: no, they don’t. Or rather, yes
they do, but they’re hopelessly wrong. The notion that we should look
back before the time of capitalism for a gentler era in which machines
had not turned men into commodities — the shared vision of Rooster
Byron, the Dale Farm travellers and the happy campers of St Paul’s —
is dangerous rubbish. We can’t all live, like Byron does, off the
proceeds of selling our rare blood. Some of us have to work.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>It
needs to be said that the era of capitalist accumulation, to adopt
their lingo, has been the most prosperous time in the history of
humankind. In the 800 years before 1820, income per head across the
world was static and so was life expectancy. Life wasn’t much more than
a matter of choosing which noxious disease to die from. In the 200
years of industrial capitalism, income per head has risen by 800 per
cent. Life expectancy has tripled and back- breaking work has declined,
especially for children, who now do something unheard of in both the
medieval era and </span><span><i>Jerusalem,</i></span><span> namely go to school.</span></div><div><span>It
is therefore silly to suppose that something called “capitalism” or
some malign mechanisms known as “markets” failed in 2008. There was a
serious failure in one part of the banking sector and, because the
wholesale lending market ties banks together, an obvious risk of
contagion. It was hugely serious and it’s not over yet. But none of
this justifies the egregious, almost incomprehensible claim from the
St Paul’s protest that global commerce is “our global Assad, our
global Gaddafi”. To use one of Blake’s better phrases, thoughts like
these are “reptiles of the mind”.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>The
thing to remember about the new Jerusalem is that we will never get
there. Rooster Byron is an engaging charlatan. “Who cares about asses
like Blake or bores like Byron?” wrote Philip Larkin. There is no idyll
in the forest and the better world won’t be the stuff of great drama.
The prosaic truth is that the solution to bad capitalism is better
capitalism. If we want to build Jerusalem in England’s green and
pleasant land, we’ll need some builders and they’ll need to turn a
decent profit.</span></div><div><span>As
long as he lived, Blake struggled to hold an audience. It is only
later generations, yearning for the comfort of a golden past, who have
fallen for his euphonious silliness. When we are tempted to declare the
natural common wealth of all men, in an age before property rights,
and when we find ourselves lamenting the loss of a prior paradise, we
are always, without exception, talking mystical Blake-guff.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Evict
the travellers and ignore the protesters. Capitalism under the rule of
law will never take us to the garden of earthly delights, but it is as
close as we will ever get. “You can see, then,” said W.H. Auden in </span><span><i>Vespers</i></span><span>, “why, between my Eden and his New Jerusalem, no treaty is negotiable.”</span></div>
<div><br></div><div><span><b>Times Saturday 22/10 Leader ( my highlights ) </b></span></div><div>
<span>The
protesters camped outside St Paul’s for the last week are vague about
what they are for. But given what we know they are against, we could
assume that in the age-old contest between God and Mammon such avowed
anti-capitalists might favour the spiritual over the material. </span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Yet
in seeking to shut down a stock exchange, these would-be
revolutionaries have instead shut down a cathedral. As attempts to
topple the global financial system go, turning a war against the
supposedly evil pinstripe into a conflict with the saintly cassock is a
pretty hopeless outcome. </span></div><div><br></div><div><span>With
no little presumption, the protesters have renamed the piazza Tahrir
Square. Drawing further spurious parallels with the Arab Spring, the
few hundred occupants seek to characterise themselves as the true voice
of the people. They are not “the people”, however, but quite a small
group of people, just as those who toil in the Stock Exchange, or
worship at St Paul’s, or come to appreciate its architectural glory, or
trade from premises in the area, or navigate their way through the
added traffic congestion, are also groups of people. Rather larger
groups of people, indeed. </span></div><div><br></div><div><span>The
freedom to protest is a vital part of our democracy. But so is the
freedom to religious assembly in the place of one’s choosing and the
freedom to go unhindered about one’s daily business. </span><span><b>The protesters should reflect on these competing freedoms, one of which they are abusing, the others curtailing. </b></span></div>
<div><span><b>Having so reflected, if they are the passionate democrats they claim to be</b></span><span>,
they should leave St Paul’s in peace, and instead devote such energy
and talent as they possess towards improving the world in more
practical ways. </span></div><div><br></div><div><span><b>Times Leader Oct 18</b></span></div><div>
<br></div><div><span><b>Profits and Protest </b></span></div><div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>Critics of capitalism misjudge the causes of the financial crisis and the </span></div><div><span> recuperative power and potential of markets </span></div>
<div><span> </span></div><div><span>The global economy remains in a crisis sparked by the collapse of the </span></div>
<div><span> Western banking system three years ago. A movement has arisen that believes </span></div><div><span> it has the answers, or at least the right diagnosis. The problem, it </span></div>
<div><span> maintains, is corporate greed, the bankers and government austerity </span></div><div><span> programmes. This protest is wrong-headed and there is little purpose in </span></div>
<div><span> being polite about it. </span></div><div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>Protesters gathered in more than 900 cities in America, Europe and Asia this </span></div><div><span> weekend. Their inspiration was a protest that started in New York a month </span></div>
<div><span> ago under the name Occupy Wall Street. Among the rallies was one in London. </span></div><div><span> Several hundred demonstrators have now set up camp outside St Paul’s </span></div>
<div><span> Cathedral. It is unclear when they might leave. The ground immediately </span></div><div><span> outside the building is owned by the cathedral, whose staff have been </span></div>
<div><span> cautiously sympathetic to the protesters while requiring that worshippers </span></div><div><span> and tourists be able to pass freely. </span></div>
<div><span> </span></div><div><span>The right of assembly is integral to a free society, but on the evidence of </span></div>
<div><span> recent history there is little danger of its being overlooked. Protection of </span></div><div><span> that liberty has recently made Parliament Square a semi-permanent and </span></div>
<div><span> squalid place of protest. St Paul’s should not become another. </span></div><div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>There are two weaknesses in the demands of the anti-capitalist protesters: </span></div><div><span> their analysis of what has gone wrong and their recommendation of how to put </span></div>
<div><span> it right. Bankers have not helped their case with some grievously </span></div><div><span> insensitive public relations, but it is flatly wrong to explain the </span></div>
<div><span> financial collapse as a tale simply about avarice. </span></div><div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>The crisis happened, first, because monetary policy was too loose for too </span></div><div><span> long, which fuelled a bubble in credit, and, second, because of a </span></div>
<div><span> misconceived shift to financial deregulation. Banks are not like other </span></div><div><span> industries: they have wider obligations than to their shareholders alone. </span></div>
<div><span> They have responsibilities to their depositors and to the stability of the </span></div><div><span> financial system. They failed in both respects, not only because bankers </span></div>
<div><span> themselves wanted quick ways to make lots of money, but also owing to a </span></div><div><span> perverse system of incentives in which it made sense to take on debt and </span></div>
<div><span> deplete capital reserves to boost shareholder returns. </span></div><div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>The errors were catastrophic. Reforms in regulation and in the mandate of </span></div><div><span> central bankers are essential. This demonstrates not the immorality of the </span></div>
<div><span> system but the inherent cyclical instability of a complex economy. There is </span></div><div><span> always a risk of financial contagion because banks are tied to each other in </span></div>
<div><span> the wholesale lending market. But great economic gains are achieved through </span></div><div><span> a system that allocates capital to businesses that can make profitable use </span></div>
<div><span> of it. Britain’s economy is closely tied to the fortunes of the financial </span></div><div><span> services sector, and it makes no sense to hamper this. </span></div>
<div><span> </span></div><div><span>What makes even less sense is the programme of the protesters. It takes not </span></div>
<div><span> only a lack of proportion but a lack of moral seriousness to maintain that </span></div><div><span> global commerce is “our global Assad, our global Gaddafi”. The movement’s </span></div>
<div><span> supporters would do well to consider John Maynard Keynes’s maxim that it is </span></div><div><span> better a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow </span></div>
<div><span> citizens. </span></div><div><span> </span></div><div>
<span>In reality, such supranational bodies as the World Trade Organisation and </span></div><div><span> the IMF are fallible but important means of creating a system of rules that </span></div>
<div><span> limit arbitrary power and serve popular needs. The expansion of trade and </span></div><div><span> economic integration enable poor nations to better themselves. Gains in </span></div>
<div><span> productivity allow growth in wages and economic development. That is how </span></div><div><span> scores of millions of peasants in China have been lifted out of poverty in a </span></div>
<div><span> generation. The protesters think that they are standing up for the little </span></div><div><span> guy; in fact their mish-mash of proposals makes for a muddled charter of </span></div>
<div><span> stagnation in which he would suffer most. The fact is that economic liberty </span></div><div><span> enables the little guy to stand up for himself. </span><br>
</div></div>
</blockquote></div><br></div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br></div></div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br></div>
</html>